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The twenty-first century is no longer a novelty. As we begin the New Year, the past 15 years provide sufficient data to allow us to identify the principal economic, geopolitical and social processes and tendencies that will determine the nature and direction of events in 2015 and the years ahead.

It must first of all be said that within the space of 15 years, the 21st century has refuted, in the most crushing manner, the “End of History” triumphalists who proclaimed, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that capitalism and bourgeois democracy represented the unsurpassable summit of human achievement. By the end of 2014, the prevailing economic and political structures appeared to be plunging, with ever greater velocity, into the abyss.

ThisPerspective isthe text of the speech given by David North, chairman of the World Socialist Web Site international editorial board and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), to open the International Online May Day Rally hosted by the International Committee of the Fourth International and the WSWS on Sunday, May 4.

Workers and young people on six continents and from 84 countries attended the online May Day rally held by the International Committee of the Fourth International Sunday. They heard ten speakers who spoke to the worldwide audience from the United States, Britain, Germany, Sri Lanka and Australia.

The rally was the first of its kind for the international working class movement, bringing together a global audience in a common rally against war, inequality and dictatorship. It was organized through the World Socialist Web Site, the daily Internet publication of the ICFI.

Over two thousand people registered for the event, and more than 700 comments were posted during the two and a half hours that it was broadcast. The enormous response to the call for the rally is a reflection of growing popular opposition around the world to the policy of war and social counterrevolution, and the widespread hunger for political analysis and a political alternative.

Helen Halyard, a national committee member of the Socialist Equality Party (US), and a member of the Trotskyist movement for more than 40 years, served as chairman.

Today marks one week since the speech by Dianne Feinstein on the floor of the US Senate in which the California Democrat, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly charged the CIA with cover-up, the withholding of documents, and unconstitutional spying on her committee, which has the legal responsibility to oversee the spy agency.

Feinstein, a longtime rubber-stamp defender of the US intelligence agencies, accused the CIA of attempting to intimidate her committee and charged that the agency “may well have violated the separation-of-powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution,” and also “the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”